She stood, wiping her hands on her gown, leaving faint smears of his blood on the silk. Her shoulders were square, her chin high, but her eyes—those eyes that had seen too much—were glassy with unshed tears. “I know,” she said, her voice soft but unyielding, “what it is to carry that weight. To hate yourself for not being enough. For not knowing how to stop it. For being too late. I know, Draco.”
She didn’t ask for his secrets. Didn’t demand his trust. Instead, she laid her own bare, a gift forged in pain, offered without expectation.
Draco—bleeding, broken, furious with the world and himself—stared at her. Her words cracked something in him, a fault line he’d buried beneath titles and brandy and rage. For the first time, he saw her not as the duchess he’d bound by duty, nor the meddlesome scholar who challenged his walls, but as someone who’d clawed through the same wreckage he had. Someone who’d loved, and lost, and carried the scars in silence.
They were not so different after all.
He wanted to hate her for showing him that truth. For seeing the rot beneath his armor and not flinching. For offering him a mirror not of Lucius, but of himself—a man who might still be worth saving.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/8095219/chapters/18550174
